 This is The Reason Speak Easy with Nick Colesta. All right, well, thank you for coming out. We are recording in Midtown at the Blue Building, which is also the home of the Psychedelic Assembly. And we are talking tonight with the authors of The Canceling of the American Mind, how cancel culture undermines trust, destroys institutions, and threatens us all, but there is a solution. I don't know about that subtitle, but we have the authors. They will explain it along with everything else about the strange world we find ourselves in. Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlatt, please welcome them. Greg, as I suspect many of you know, is the head of fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. And he's also the co-author of a previous bestselling book called The Coddling of the American Mind. And his co-author this time is Ricky Schlatt, who's a New York City-based journalist, who was a fellow at fire researcher and is a New York Post columnist, is a host of the Lost Debate podcast, and also at Times of Reason contributor, so please give it up for Greg and Ricky. Okay, so let's start with the subtitle. Okay, the book is called The Canceling of the American Mind, and then the subtitle is, Canceling of the American Mind's Trust Destroys Institution and Threatens Us All, M-Dash, but there is a solution. Yeah, okay. There was some debate about that. I wanted an emoticon in there. Okay, you know that might have kept the sentence going, but why don't we start, Ricky, what's the elevator pitch for this book? What is it about and why is it relevant now? Well, I think it's two-fold. On the first front, people are still saying that Canceling of the American Mind that cancel culture does not exist, which is absolutely crazy and defies all statistics fundamentally. But also, cancel culture is not just about the people that are torn down, it's about the epistemic crisis that it creates and the devastation of the body of common knowledge that we all share and also the undermining of trust in between people interpersonally. And for me as a young person, the undermining of being able to grow up and have the freedom to fumble and make mistakes as well. So I think it's important on a ton of different levels. I have to say as an old person, you know, tough. You should have been born when I was born, but would you, Greg, what is the working definition of cancel culture? Basically, we're trying to give it the name of this historical era that we're in. I'm a First Amendment lawyer, I'm big on the history of freedom of speech and a lot of what we call mass censorship events have names. So alien sedition 1798, even though it's really a sedition act of 1798, Red Scare 1, 20s, Red Scare 2, also known as McCarthyism, et cetera, PMRC, the comic book scare. So basically, we're proposing more or less that this be a historical definition of a unique and weird period where there's been a lot of people losing their jobs because of their opinion. That's really one of the things we're trying to show is this is on par with any of these previous moments of mass censorship and actually exceeds them in terms of numbers of professors fired. Yeah, talk a bit about the professors, because I mean, there are a couple of different sites, right, or locations where this is particularly strong. Academia, clearly one of them. What are the numbers that you're talking about? Yeah, so this was an interesting thing. We now have a great research department at fire. And that was, you know, partially a labor love on my part because I was always the lawyer who was pretending to be fire social scientists. But we've been able to grow it. That's how we actually have our campus free speech rankings, which is based on 13 different factors. So real quick through the stats. And our definition is the uptick of campaigns beginning around 2014 to get people fired, deplatformed, expelled, and the culture of fear that resulted from that. And I think it's always important to root numbers in comparisons. When I started at fire, I actually landed in Philadelphia at 9.10 a.m. on 9.11. All of my first cases were involving people who said jerky or insensitive things about the attacks or people who said, let's go get those terrorists but set it in a considered to be a rude way. We now know, and it was always a bad period for academic freedom. There was a moral panic, and it actually followed the normal MO of mass censorship events in history. There was a national security crisis. Usually the way it goes is either a national security crisis or a large-scale war that you have these mass censorship events. And it was bad, and everybody knew it was bad. And 17 professors were targeted for being canceled, as we would say, which basically means punish for their speech. There were more students as well, but we're pretty small at the time. So we know that we probably know a fraction of the students who got in trouble. Three professors were fired. It was really, really bad historically. One professor being fired, Stephen Salida, resulted in an entire issue of the American Association of University Professors to do a whole summer issue on it. And all three of those professors, by the way, were justified under things that weren't related to speech, where Churchill had a pretty long history of academic misconduct that was real. One of the other ones, Samuel Arian, was fired because of ties, real ties to terrorist organizations. And the third one was fired on the basis that she stopped teaching her class for a substantial chunk of time and talked about something that wasn't related. So again, bad, chilled speech period. I wasn't used to professors getting fired, though, and never tenured professors in my early career. For cancel culture, we're talking about over a thousand attempts to get professors fired or punished in some way. About two-thirds of them result in someone being punished in some way. About one-fifth of them, about 200 result in them losing their jobs. Which, by the way, like the number during McCarthyism of people who lost their job due to being a communist is about 62, 63. They count other people who lost their opinions in this massive study that they did right towards the end of McCarthyism. And there were about 90 fired for their opinion overall, which is usually rounded up to 100. We now think that there's probably somewhere between 100 and 150 fired. So 200 people fired means it's worse, like in terms of actual numbers. What's the time period that you're... 2014 to mid last year, July. And the period that's considered McCarthyism is 11 years. It's 47 to 57. So we still have time, but I did want to add one more stat. One in six, we know this is a crazy undercount as well. One in six professors, according to our survey, one in six say that they've been either threatened with investigation or investigated for their academic freedom. That means the numbers are absolutely colossal. Students, about 9% of them say that they've been... they've actually been face sanctions for their speech. That's an insanely huge number. And about one-third of professors say that they've been told to avoid controversial research. So we know that we're just... we're only seeing a portion of it. And this isn't simply what they're doing in the classroom. This is outside of the classroom as well. It's three things. It's research, pedagogy, classroom, and extramural speech, which means talking as a citizen. You open the book and the book is really well structured. You have kind of a chapter that talks about a general discussion. Then you have case studies. The first case study is at Hamline University. Ricky, remind us what happened there and why it exemplifies cancel culture. Absolutely. So recently there was a case there that I think was unusual in the sense that it just got widespread disdain from across the political aisle because it was such an egregious case of cancel culture and a liberalism on campus. But there was a professor named Erica Lopez Prater who decided to show in one of her courses an image of the prophet Muhammad, which is considered sacrilegious by some people who follow Islam. And so she said in her syllabus that that was going to be on in a class. She told people that you could get an excuse from class if it's untenable for you to see that. She warned them multiple times ahead of time. She gave ample warning in every way, shape, and form. And also just told everyone that the only reason I'm showing you this is because there are some sects of Islam that do not find this offensive. This is a piece of art that was commissioned by a Muslim king. And in the end, she ended up being squeezed out of her job for doing that because one student did show up to that class, decided afterwards that she was offended and did basically like a PR, like a press conference, right? Basically saying that she'd been so offended and aggrieved and the president of the university came out and said that this is beyond freedom of speech, this is just offensive. And she ended up getting squeezed out for that reason and it was a perfect example of cancel culture, just defying common sense, defying just pluralism and democracy in a very fundamental level. And so that's why we decided to call this one out as our first opener because pretty much everyone condemned it in the end. It was unbelievable and Hamline did have to reverse course. Well, actually, she's still fired and the university president stepped down, but more recently they basically said that they did the right thing in this case. And one of the best articles about this is actually Amna Khalid who's a Muslim and she said, I'm offended as a Muslim, but she's offended at the idea that all Muslims should be offended by devotional art because Americans can be very parochial sometimes, both my parents are foreign, and they just kind of assumed, oh, every Muslim would be offended by this. I'm like, that means you don't know enough about what you're talking about. Yeah, I was going to say the happy ending there is that the university president kind of got pushed out, right? But part of cancel culture is what happens to the principles in some kind of controversy. What was the reaction of other academics? Because that's also a big part of the book. Was the professor, were there speech rights or the pedagogical freedom, academic freedom upheld, or were people like, no, that was the problem? This was a positive case in the sense that people really came to her defense. The idea that she wasn't rehired in the face of it is really stunning. Penn America was involved, Forest Fire was involved, the American Association of University professors came out and condemned it. So it was a moment of some amount of unanimity, but it somehow wasn't enough at the same time. One of the other places that you talk about, you know, cancel culture being writ large, is journalism and the media. Why don't we, let's talk about the case of James Bennett, who was the New York Times opinion page editor. What happened to him? Well, one thing, I wrote an article about this basically, trying to remind people that James Bennett, you know, was, and part of what they wanted him to do was help fix the fact that in 2016, the New York Times was like, wow, we're incredibly out of touch. We really didn't see Trump happening. And then you added people like Barry Weiss to the staff. You added people like Brett Stevens, you know, both of whom they got from the Wall Street Journal. There was an attempt to actually have more conservatives involved and also have people like James Bennett, who seemed to be, you know, open to covering things from all over the political spectrum. He was our editor when Coddling in the American Mind came out at the Atlantic. And so that was kind of the setting, but then there was, you know, I think you can tell the rest of the story. So Tom Cotton, who's a sitting senator speaking the minds of a plurality of Americans at the time, made an op-ed case for bringing troops into quell BLM riots and protests, obviously controversial, but also a viewpoint that is worth hearing if it's a sitting senator and if that's something that a lot of Americans are animated to do at the time. And shared by the president, you know, at the same time. Yeah, no kidding. And as a result, I mean, this is something that's frightening to both of us as civil libertarians that prospect, but as a result of just that op-ed being published, there was a widespread petition at the New York Times that a ton of their, I think in the hundreds of their employees signed saying that they felt unsafe being there. There were people torn down, including Bennett and also Barry Ways at the same point in time ended up resigning. There was an institutional meltdown over a viewpoint that was widely held that should have been tolerated. And in the end, instead of tolerating just the person who signed off on that op-ed, we had to tear him down, not just the person who even had the opinion in the first place. So I think, you know, there's a really, this is a near and dear case study in my heart, because I'm 23. I only recently started my career in journalism. And I think that there's a really profound effect that this is going to have with the next generation of young people who might be more heterodox, who might be in the center or right-leaning like myself, who say, I can't go into the lion's den at an institution like this where you really do want the biggest and most respected newspaper in the country to be a place where different viewpoints can collide. Do you think for you and, you know, you're a columnist at the New York Post, you've written widely elsewhere. Does it, you know, just on a pure reaction level, does it make you think, does it chill your speech or does it make you kind of more extreme and say, I'm not, you know, screw the New York Times, which is essentially what Barry Ways did, right? She said, I can't take this anymore, and I'm going out onto the frontier and I'm building my own shining city on a hill, which is the free press. You know, just how do you think you respond to that? I mean, for me personally, 2014 is when we say that cancel culture started. I was 14 at the time. That's when my political consciousness really developed. And honestly, like I had a reactionary period of time where I saw wokeness go way overboard or illiberalism on the left. I associated liberal with illiberal, which is something that I've now grown out of and I understand the broader context. But I think that there is a considerable threat that the generation of kids who come up in this sensorious age where they feel like they can't say what they mean or they see institutional stupidity, a term that Jonathan Haidt coined for just the culture of conformity that happens in these left-wing institutions. You're going to have reactionary young people who say, well, I'm not that. So I'm going to go even further to the right or tack to the opposite side, which I don't think is a positive thing either. Greg, could you speak to in your capacity as a lawyer? One of the things I was striking about the Bennett case and the book is filled with episodes that the reader will either remember vaguely or it's like, oh, and then it is kind of amazing. I mean, it's like a terrible version of a Proust where you get this back flow of like, oh my God, I had forgotten about that or whatever. But what was going on when everybody at the New York Times who was commenting, they kept saying, I feel unsafe, unsafe, unsafe. Is that like HR speed? Is that like a secret word that is the equivalent of hitting a buzzer? One of the reasons why they're saying they were unsafe is because they had a general policy of not criticizing the paper unless you actually think someone made you unsafe. So it was actually kind of a loophole that allowed a lot of these reporters and employees to come out and demand that something be done against this horrifying article. So it was really kind of like they were gaming the HR system. Really, you're right. And I think also they were a lot of younger employees who went to college like myself on the back of my ID card at NYU. Here's 911 in the Campus Safety Office and a crisis hotline for your mental health and then the bias response hotline to report speech. So if you grew up and you went to college, your administrators are saying, report those around you if you feel unsafe or offended on campus and then you show up at a college and you'd been coddled by those administrators all the way through, then certainly you're going to abuse HR in the same way that they just become your new bias response hotline. And it's a point that we made in coddling the American mind. We call it sort of intermediated experiences. And I think we've made a horrible mistake by teaching people in a free society that when you face a problem with someone individually, call an adult and keeping that going for... But on another level... For the whole rest of your life. That is also, that makes sense, doesn't it? If you're on a playground and a bigger kid is picking on a smaller kid, you don't expect the little kid to go like, hey, we really should sit down and work this out, right? I mean, a lot of us actually did that as kids. We got a couple of guys who are ready to work you over in the parking lot. But what I'm getting at is, is that idea of the intermediary? What would have been otherwise? And I don't know exactly how that would apply to the New York Times thing, but... That's HR. HR has become the intermediary. But I'm saying, would they go after Tom Cotton? You know, I am never going to Arkansas ever again, or whatever. But, you know, is it that these were good ideas that got out of hand, or are they bad ideas in the first place to have that kind of intermediary institution within a workplace? They're ideas with pluses and minuses, like most things, but clearly we've been sounding the alarm that they were getting out of hand and could be abused to punish speech. And this is something that fire co-founder Harvey Silverglate was warning way back in the 70s. I'm like, these regulations are much too vague. They're going to be used to stifle speech. And meanwhile, one thing that we point out in the book, you know, I definitely have a little bit of a social science temperament, so I like to point to impersonal factors that actually... And yet you went to law school. You took the easy way out. It's true. I had a ton of fun in law school. It was great. Let's talk about psychotherapy. This was, again, you know, you will remember many of these stories and whatnot, but what is going on with therapy and the way that cancel culture has kind of worked its way into, you know, if there is one relationship where you are supposed to be away from all of the hurly-burly of life and be able to talk openly and honestly with somebody, it is with your therapist. What's going on there? Well, this is near and dear to my heart and my experience with calling the American mind started with me being hospitalized for depression back in the Belmont Center in Philadelphia back in 2007. So the idea that you would actually have psychotherapists who think they should intervene if you have wrongthink in your mind when you're talking one-on-one with them is about as horrifying as I can imagine, and it's no exaggeration to say, I'm not sure I'd still be here if I actually had a psychotherapist who corrected me. And as far as a chapter that we could easily expand into its own book and maybe we should, the psychotherapy stuff scares the living hell out of us and I have, I know, people who are actually getting their clinical psychology PhDs. I know we talked to a number of practitioners. More has come out since we finished the book. Barry Weiss had some articles about, you know, intervening. Camille Foster talks about Huta from the fifth column and also a Fire Board member. He talks about going to therapy and needs a lot of therapy. No judgment. No judgment. He's working on it. That's what's good. He was going to couples therapy and he got told that, well, maybe your problem with this relationship is that, is your internalized racism, like your internalized self-hatred. And he's like, I'm paying you for this. And dropped out. But we hear these, British Fetacy talks about this as well. In terms of, like, what I've heard from the existing clinical psychology programs is that they will pain over the nightmare scenario of what if it turns out the person I'm treating is a Trump supporter or a Republican. And of course the answer is then you treat them compassionately. Not, you have to drop out, you know? One of the, you know, in the coddling of the American mind, you talk about three great untruths that, you know, are governing a lot of our public discourse. And in this book, you add a fourth one. Could you just run through what the three great untruths and then what's the special cherry on top that comes out in this? So the great untruths are these ideas that basically they contradict modern wisdom, ancient wisdom and contradict modern psychological thinking and will make you miserable if you believe them. So the first three are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings which sounds deceptively nice but it's terrible, terrible advice. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Like, if you believe that truly you're going to have a miserable life. And we added a fourth one to this one. No bad person has any good opinion. To make the point that the way we argue, to cancel culture is part, one of the things we try to argue is that it's part of a dysfunctional way of arguing that we should not tolerate. And one of the tactics that we use way too much is, oh, here's my argument. You did something terrible 15 years ago. I don't have to listen to you anymore. And it's like, wow, like that has nothing to do with what their actual opinion was. So I always give the example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Miserable human being. Absolutely terrible. Awful to David Hume. Awful to his mistress. Gave all his kids up for adoption. Probably something... In his defense, that was probably better for the kids. That was probably better for the kids. Yeah, that's a good point. But that doesn't mean he's wrong about everything. I think he's wrong about a lot of things. But I don't think he's wrong necessarily about everything. And we understand that intuitively that just because someone's terrible doesn't mean they're wrong. And just because someone's great and really nice doesn't mean they're right. Did you... In a way, Ricky, you are kind of coming through the... Coming of age in the era that you guys are writing about. Did you experience that? Particularly this one where it's like, well, if you are a... You're a bad person, so you have bad ideas. Like that's... Where did that start showing up in your kind of educational experience? Well, for me personally, I was in high school in the lead-up to the 2016 election and we just had a scourge of cancel culture explode even though we were still teenagers and I at the time was more worried about boys and acne than Trump. But we... I saw that en masse scale for the first time. It was really frightening to me. And frankly, as a result I self-censored for a while and by the time I got to NYU I knew I was in an ideological minority as a writing libertarian here in New York City. And I actually started hiding books under my bed when I moved in because I was a new freshman in 18 and trying to make friends. What were the books? Thomas Sowell and Jordan Peterson under the bed banished which they're now loud and proud on my shelves and we just did Jordan Peterson's podcast so cancel me now please. But I think that it's... The reason that I brought up my age in our elevator pitch is because I think it's so important to realize that there is a crisis of authenticity with young people who are growing up who are supposed to explore different ideas and be an anarchist one day and a communist the next day and figure it out in the end. But we've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up. And actually if you look at generation to generation views of cancel culture the older people tend to be more negative on cancel culture and then it goes up and up until you get to millennials who are apparently very gung-ho. But then Gen Z fundamentally switches that and actually has the most negative view of cancel culture of any generation and that's because you cannot be a young person and grow up in a graceless society. There is a special place in hell and in your book for Yale law school. Oh yeah. And I suspect Greg that's because I'm betting you went to Stanford, I'm betting you didn't get into Yale but I'm just and Stanford comes in for a lot of abuse as well. Rightly. But what is going on at Yale that is so awful? Well, Yale is kind of where to a degree it started. You know, the attempt to get to cancel Nicholas and Erica Krstakis back in 2015 was and I was there I actually want to videotape the confrontation was frankly one of the most depressing things I've seen in my entire life. The minority students in particular had no better friend on the campus than Nicholas and Erica Krstakis. The people are like saints and they're also brilliant by the way. And in 2015 what people forget to mention is there was a whole kind of there was a whole rash of sort of what would later be called sort of Black Lives Matter protests on campus which young fires psyched to defend the only problem was a lot of them were demanding that censorship happen that one started at University of was it Wesleyan or University of Massachusetts that a paper, you know, like a student paper stop printing, you know, for example there was a cancel attempt about someone who's trying to be very nice at Claremont McKenna to a student and apparently she wasn't nice in the right way. And so this was happening all over the country and it seemed to be kind of like there was and only lasted for one semester and in this case this was something related to a Halloween message that Yale had produced I think of like a diversity group of the semi-official saying don't dress up offensively for Halloween. And you know some people argue oh but you have to understand the context. I'm like I understand the context for five years Halloween had been the biggest disaster on campus at what was it like Cornell there was a really creepy statement that students find wearing offensive costumes may be asked to disrobe and I was like that's messed up. So we talk a lot about some of the details of the Christakis case that haven't been made public before but if that was the only case then Yale would be comparatively fine. But I looked at it and every single year we were having some kind of crazy case at Yale. We had the case where the student in the law school was talking about he was a Native American student he sent something to the multicultural societies you know organizing a party and said it's going to be a total trap house. Which he thought meant a place to have fun like drinking beer but apparently the argument was that because trap house was originally a name for a drug dealer's place that came out of Black slang that that was deeply offensive and this guy needed to apologize to everybody and by the way they already wrote the apology for him. They implied that he might not be able to be a lawyer. They basically said like oh but you know you have to pass this character judgment and you know and it's like wow like nice legal career it's a shame you said this one thing that we don't approve of. So and of course the shout down that happened with Kristen Wagoner people really need to get. Shout downs at elite law schools are not normal. What happened at Stanford very shameful we have a whole chapter on it and what happened at Yale was really was really you just recap very quickly what happened so this was interesting because it was a very well known left leaning constitutional lawyer and Kristen Wagoner from the Alliance Defending Freedom conservative there to sort of kumbaya about what right and left can agree on they were going to talk about freedom of speech and I think more than a hundred students showed up you know shouted it down had to be escorted out it was a brain wreck and I believe they had to cancel the event early and you know I don't think any charges were brought against any students but the thing that people really need to know is that every time this happens on a college campus whether it's a D platforming or Carol Hoeven getting fired or for that matter that the Nicholas Crisaka situation universities need to do an investigation to figure out did the administrators do anything to stop this and did the administrators help this together because when it comes to the Carol Hoeven case that was all started by a DEI administrator this is a professor at Harvard who argued that biological sex is real on Fox News and ultimately that elite left due to the backlash the same thing even I didn't realize this when I asked Nicholas Crisaka there were a bunch of DEI administrators in the angry crowd that surrounded him and was shouting and in this case the idea that the administrators who actually brought the charges against the kid who all of them should not be at a university so I think that what we're missing is a lot of times people are like oh you're just blaming the students I'm like no it's something with the students and some administrators working together that actually created this made this so severe on campus and I might add that we spend a lot of time talking about Yale and Stanford and Harvard just got an abysmal rating and then by far the lowest rating on free speech rankings per fire and I think that it's important because these are the schools that funnel kids into the most influential positions in society but they do hold disproportionate weight because elite colleges are inculcating illiberalism at a rate that other schools aren't and I think that it does distort our vision of young people in the next generation because I find that people are so often shocked to hear that Gen Z doesn't like cancel culture but that's because there are a lot of us like myself who are proud dropouts or didn't go to college or didn't go to the hoity-toity colleges and there are a lot of young people just Columbia I'm a proud dropout but I think it's important to realize that there are a whole host of young people who did not come from this squeaky wheel tyranny of the minority group of people who do show up in institutions and scare the life out of everyone but the fact of the matter is whether it's young people or American people at large 80% of Americans think political correctness has gone too far the vast majority of people do not want to live in a world where they're tripping over tripwires at every turn or censoring their speech or biting their tongue for fear that someone will give them the worst possible interpretation of what they said this is a tyranny of the minority and courage is contagious and there is strength in numbers and I think that we really can fight back with that knowledge you know just to say at Yale for a minute longer too it's Yale was also one of the birthplaces of critical legal studies which can you talk a bit about where does this cancel culture come from sure absolutely we spent a fair amount of time on it because we actually to be honest we go through it fairly quickly because we it's a very good read I mean there's a lot of pages but it's a good read so the free speech movement began in Berkeley in 1964 and the anti free speech movement began you see Santa Barbara in 1965 with a person who gets a lot of credit these days but he really has it coming Herbert Marcuse a name that you probably how many people are familiar with this name yeah so Herbert Marcuse was someone who fled Nazi Germany and showed up and realized how bad America was and was considered the guru of the new left and this and wrote something called repressive tolerance which you really need to read because it's supposed to be a great intellectual who wrote this and it's not more complicated than my side good people bad people know no free speech for bad people because and he really I forgot that he literally says regressive so called conservatives the right basically like his idea is to have a truly free society or willing if there ever was we need to actually be intolerant of regressive voices so it's very explicitly a call for censorship against the right you know from and unfortunately there were people who actually took him seriously and actually agreed now for a long time what I'd describe as what I still consider myself the liberal leaning left actually was winning that essentially free speech was ascendant it was doing pretty well for a while but over that over the time and one of the things about critical race theory even though it's come up a lot and fire will defend your right to teach critical race theory and we have gone to court to defend it but I do think that every time someone mentions that they also need to say oh and by the way that's where speech code started that was Herbert mark that wasn't her market that was um uh Richard Delgado Mary Matsuda all basically all the founders of critical race theory were actually you know co-authors of the words that wound book which is all about the hate speech movement and this led to the speech code movement from the first article that came out by Richard Delgado back in 1980 so this was very intentional and like I was saying about being into social science I like the impersonal kind of ways of explaining things big broad trends that people don't have as much control over but you have to be really clear the anti-free speech movement was to a large degree incredibly intentional and continues to be to stay at Yale as well there was something that came out in the mid-seventies called the Woodward report can you explain what that is it was so great it was so terrific and they specifically disavowed it in court the Woodward report was this wonderful report that came out in the 1970s and I think that was really good I think it was 75 I don't think it was 75 I don't know I just read your books yeah so it was it was talking about the right to question the unquestionable you know it was a stirring defense of the importance of freedom of speech even for speech that we find deeply offensive and it was supposed to be kind of one of the things that really set Yale apart and there haven't been living up to it for a long time but one thing that was kind of sobering to see is them actually going to court in a case where actually there were it was more of an attack on someone more of an attack on someone for saying things that were more of an attack on the right that they were in a litigation against this one professor and they specifically disowned you know the court basically saying oh that's just more or less arguing in court that that's just puffery we didn't really mean any of that and it was named after C. Van Woodward who was a sociologist on Yale's faculty who actually coined the term approvingly new left so he you know just as Berkeley is no longer the home of the free speech movement it's interesting to see Yale kind of turn completely in the opposite direction but I will say again Harvard really impressed us by coming in not just last but actually getting a negative score on the campus free speech ranking so what does that mean they're stealing people's words it's like minds all over campus now that essentially you get negatives for deep platforming and firing professors and we didn't actually think that we'd get an indicative number so we rounded up to zero in the case of Harvard and they came at us with some people being like the methodology is crazy and I'm like oh an opportunity to find our methodology largest study ever conducted of student opinion largest study ever conducted largest database of professor cancellations largest database of deep platforming largest database of speech codes and largest database of student cancellations ever assembled and you really want to take us on on this and now I think they're starting to get it a little bit that they have a problem let's talk a little bit about right wing versions of cancer culture which you go into the book now you are not saying that this is perfectly parallel or diametrical right but what what is what's the right wing version of cancel culture that we're seeing now Ricky yeah actually it surprises most people to hear that about a third of attempts to get professors censored or fired are coming from the right and attacks and professors to the left of them and that tends to happen less in the really shiny institutions that garner the headlines and more at smaller schools but it's still meaningful and I think that it's it's it's definitely true that the the headlines for cancel culture have been pretty domineered by by the right wing conservative media because there's the campus bookness gone crazy but it does happen in mass on the right there's intergroup cancel culture in a way that I think is really frightening on the right we talked about David French for example who's maligned for having some some different views about Trump and conservatism I think especially in the post maga era it's not just anyone who might be critical of Trump or to doubt Trump to cancel them or to squeeze them out we talk about Megan Kelly as an example of that who gave me my first job in media and was squeezed out from the right and then from the left in a pretty spectacular fashion and a demonstration of how one person who is or at the time was in pretty much the center right area could be canceled by both sides there's also the divisive concept laws that are proliferating throughout mostly Republican held states or red states what are divisive concept laws and how do they apply to K through 12 in higher education yeah so divisive concept laws are ones passed in the state legislatures across the country by Republican legislatures that sometimes actually try that primarily focus on K through 12 curricula but also sometimes focus on books you have in your library so on the K through 12 but also but most importantly there was one law and I do want to emphasize this there was one and it's really bad in Florida called the stop woke act that focused on higher ed curricula there were some others that focused on getting rid of DEI administrations but if you mentioned that as being terrible without mentioning that DEI administrators are often the ones enforcing the orthodoxy bad for academic freedom to actually reduce those departments but when it comes to the stop woke act it was laughably unconstitutional we told everybody it basically they actually argued in court that under this law you could have a critique of affirmative action but you couldn't be pro affirmative action in the class it's like thank you for explaining how incredibly unconstitutional this is and we warned everybody that was unconstitutional they passed it anyway they took it we took it to court we won fire one in court we got a ruling saying that was positively dystopian and it was so the ones the one that actually applies to curricula in higher ed are laughably unconstitutional but so far there's been one of them and why is it different like why do states have more rights to censor things at K through 12 where it's mandatory than at colleges where it's well that that's the thing it's mandatory it's taxpayer funded and it's your kids the idea and I this you have this state gets to dictate more control oh absolutely I mean like and what I've seen that scares the hell out of me is some advocates clearly seem to agree with the former governor of Virginia that we should just let education school graduates completely control the public school system and decide what it's taught and like that would be a disaster an awful lot of what we've seen go go wrong in higher ed including the horrifying sort of North Korea like University of Delaware program those are the products of education school graduates so as long as it's mandatory as long as it's state funded as long as it's your kids there should be that democratic oversight on that part it gets a little more complicated when you get to the library stuff because K through 12 libraries there's a there's a case on point called Pico that talks about that makes the point that you shouldn't be banning a book just on the basis of its viewpoint but of course that gets a little complicated as well because you can also consider things like age appropriateness where does the right-wing cancel culture from I'm betting Ron DeSantis is not a big marcusian but I mean where where does it come from I mean I would say as someone who is right-leaning and who grew up in a context where I realized now wrongfully I associated illiberalism with liberalism just because of the context of the years they grew up and the world that I grew up in going to a boarding school and then to NYU I I've realized that the left completely left freedom of speech which used to be a fundamental principle of theirs up for grabs and anyone could grab that mantle and say here's the restorative pluralistic democratic vision to move forward but instead I think that we've seen quite a lot of people on the right just fight illiberalism with illiberalism and fists with fists in a way that is just so infuriating because I do believe that there are a plurality of people in the middle who actually still want to cart back to those principles that are what make America such a wonderful place to live in and potentially a place where we could actually fix problems but instead we're fighting fists with fists in a way that is so disappointing to me let's fist the cuff it up a little bit and why don't people who want to ask a question you can form a line up here but while we're waiting for people to amazingly quickly line up in a way that's not anticipating we'll get to you very soon but we are now a couple of weeks into a war between Israel and you know Palestinians are the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip is it and we have seen in New York City as well as all over the country and all over the world some insane speech being done on college campuses in places like Times Square by public figures by private figures and things like that can I ask you how do you how does cancel culture fit into this is good or bad for instance among the right there has been a call to say anybody who is a member of an organization that signed a letter promoting Hamas or you know justifying Hamas the most famous instance of this is a letter from Harvard where 30 plus entirely Israel's fault they are entirely to blame is that cancellation if you say anybody who is a member of those groups should never work again is that a form of cancellation or is that legitimate is it accountability culture accountability culture you know I've been on TV talking about this and I think it is still cancel culture I mean just the fact that it is cancel culture that many people agree with doesn't make it not cancel culture and I don't like black lists I like to actually deal with people individually find out what they really think about something you know give the benefit of the doubt so cancel culture is always about now to be clear do companies have the legal right to hire who they want yes and I oppose laws actually saying that they have to hire but I do want people to take deep breath take some distance and say to themselves what if we live in a country where every company was also not just a widget shop but also a political shop and the bosses politics decided to get to keep their job and it's not that fanciful because that's what it started to look like in 2020 and 2021 where people were getting fired for just having you know mildly critical BLM statements there was a huge they were being fired for supporting BLM or being against for being even mildly critical in some cases like we saw huge numbers of canceling and what happened on campus was insane in 2020 we've never been as busy as we were during that so I want people to consider what the world would look like if essentially you have a first amendment but you can't have a job if you actually honestly say your political opinion I will give one caveat though to the Harvard students I think that a big part of the problem we have as a country is that we too reflexively hire elite college graduates I think this creates serious problems and I think you should try to find out when you're hiring from elite college campuses is like okay no I understand you have a view that I find abhorrent can you work with people who disagree with you and what I'm hearing from a lot of employers is not only are they not really clear if these are actually the best and brightest you're getting from these schools I was about to say anymore but they never really were less accurately than it used to be but they're also potentially getting someone who will show up and demand that you fire your mildly Republican IT guy because they can't stand his point of view and credit where credit is due, Greg actually walks the walk and in order to hire me to be a fellow at FIRE he changed a rule that he didn't even realize was on the books that required people have a college degree and I think that it's really important for people and employers to realize that there are 4 million fewer college students today than there were a decade ago there are a lot of kids who are actually going off that trail because they think they can tread their own path or because they've seen kids graduate with degrees in feminist dance theory and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt there are very few feminist dance theory majors let's be honest but every single one of them Nick there are a plurality of these young people who are genuinely determined to pave their own path and I give credit to employers like Greg like IBM Tesla like Google who are dropping degree requirements and jobs where that's appropriate to broaden out the pool of possible applicants to kids who did take a different path and didn't get mired in this liberalism for 4 years what would happen at a place like FIRE if you know if somebody had truly abhorrent political beliefs I mean because it seems kind of easy to say well you know we would talk to them individually and as long as it didn't interfere with their work is that possible though we definitely try to maintain message discipline as an organization and if someone there was a situation that actually happened at the ACLU where you used to work back in 99 where an employee actually said of Abigail Shrier's irreversible damage that getting rid of this book is a hill I'll die on and the president of the ACLU said well we have political diversity at the ACLU and I was like well I've worked there I question that FIRE really does have that but if I had someone stand up and say at a meeting I now support a book band just for one book but I support book bands it's kind of like you should find another job all right let's go through questions quickly no preambles just a sentence what's your question sir Michael Myers why did FIRE have to change its name in order to become the ACLU and what is happening in terms of the pushback from the FIRE and the ACLU in terms of the blacklisting of people who are protesting in New York City of Palestinian rights who are being blacklisted by employers what are you doing a bridged version what happened to the ACLU and what's going on with people who are being blacklisted for supporting Palestinian rights I've been calling that out all week Alex Mori's been on TV all over the stuff I mean Vivek Ramaswamy even came out and said that blacklist are wrong and I've been consistent on that when it comes to what happened to the ACLU like ours what we say is that there are still really good people at the ACLU David Cole someone that I have tremendous respect for will work with the ACLU you know we agree on a case and we have worked with affiliates kind of our entire history when it comes to why FIRE became the foundation for individual rights and expression instead of in education it's partially because we wanted to do things in a way that we think we wouldn't repeat some of the mistakes because one of the things that we thought was a mistake that the ACLU made was having 19 practice areas and FIRE is only going to do free speech and another thing is we thought that their defense of freedom of speech was becoming too technical it was basically it began and ended at the First Amendment and we actually argue for a culture of free speech something bigger, bolder, older older than that so you know we want to be the nation's premier free speech defender and I think we're getting there can you just very quickly talk about how I mean you make the argument in this book as well as in previous work that essentially our understanding of the First Amendment is an expression of a more robust free speech culture absolutely, yeah. So just kind of explain that well it's kind of weird to even have to argue about free speech culture and I actually had a debate with Ken White about this in reason and we both don't understand each other's point at all the worst argument that I've heard against cancel culture in my opinion is that against free speech culture is that it's an argument that bad people make that essentially like Republicans utilizes this argument cynically and I'm like I'm sorry I can't take seriously the idea that bad people make the argument so I shouldn't too but we're in a common law country, the idea that there's no relationship between culture and law doesn't make a lick of sense and of course where do you think the First Amendment came from? Was it the uncreated Quran handed down? No, it was something that a number of people valued the idea of free speech enough that they put it as the first substantive of civil liberty in the Bill of Rights, the other two that they had and yet it took 150 or more years to get to a point where you could kind of publish dirty books without being arrested. There's a great book called The People's Darling Privilege by Michael Kent Curtis which I recommend to people that talks about how back when the First Amendment meant very little legally which was pretty much all the way up until 1925 and then beyond that a little bit. One of the things that actually meant that free speech wasn't in a complete free fall for at least some of that was a culture of freedom of speech, a cultural appreciation that as we say in the book everyone has a right to their opinion. And I would add that one case to make that the law on the books is not enough to protect you is that there are three countries with pretty robust free speech protections on the books that are Russia, North Korea, and Turkey. So you need people to buy into. Thank you. Next question. Do you see a viable legal reform, a legislative solution to cancellation by payment providers, communication platforms, or other distribution? Oh great question. Would you repeat it? Do you see a viable legal fix to payment providers what's web architecture discriminating on the basis of viewpoint? Well Fire has a very strong position on social media companies that we don't like laws that come in and tell social media companies how they should editorialize. We do get that like if Congress tomorrow decided yes but when it comes to web hosting sites, when it comes to payment processors, you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. You're not an expressive association and we know that if you don't, if you have this ability, you're going, you can destroy people privately. So we actually, when it comes to some of the web architecture stuff, we are sympathetic to potentially saying you can't discriminate on the basis of viewpoint there. But we do think that social media companies should not be regulated in the same way. Thank you. Next question. Hi. In the beginning of this interview you mentioned that there are three periods where you had sort of the silencing, cancel culture in the past, the Red Scare one and two and the previous one. Victorianism. So where are we now in this cycle? Like we're, it seems to be about power, the power to silence, the power to cancel, the power to get someone fired. This is today and how do we know where we are in that cycle? Or do you see any indication that we're coming out of it or we're getting more into it? So where are we in the current cycle of sensorious behavior? Well, I sometimes think that analogies to the past deceive people. History doesn't actually repeat. It barely even rhymes. And you can learn things from previous moments in history, but it doesn't mean that things are going to work out the same way they worked out before. And I think that it takes people fighting back in order to actually change things. So I actually think the best parallel to what's going on now is not the Red Scare one or two. It's not the sedition act. It's actually the Victorian era. A largely upper class movement that thinks it's morally superior, that didn't actually take place during the national security crisis that actually had a sort of puritanical idea of what should be allowed. Now, how did that eventually end? Well, for one thing, it lasted a damn long time from 1870 to basically the end of World War I is when it started to be, it started to be frayed about. There was a great group called the Free Speech League that fought against it. But there's no guarantee we actually pull out of this stuff. And it's one of the reasons why, even though we offer solutions at the end, we are under no illusion that this is easy. I don't think most campuses are taking the free speech problem all that seriously. I don't think they're taking seriously the idea that they have no viewpoint diversity and that's actually going to hurt their function. So I think that we need relatively massive changes to pull out of it and I'm not currently seeing the political will to do that. Ricky, do you see it more in generational terms? You were talking about how a lot of Gen Z people and maybe they're not the ones who can grab the mic, but they're like, screw this. We want to be able to talk and whatnot. Do you see more as social progress through a series of funerals? I mean, I think with young people the problem is we've grown up so mired in this that we're self-censoring in a degree that I think it's something like 60% according to FIRE's data of students who are self-censoring and I can say in my personal experience, having gone to NYU, hiding books under my bed then deciding one day, screw this, I'm writing an op-ed in the New York Post about free speech. I was terrified to do that and the response to it was actually tons of people coming out of the woodwork who I'd known who were across the hall in my dorm or classmates sitting next to me for an entire semester, professors I'd have, heads of departments coming to me and they'd all say oh, I totally agree with you, but just don't tell anyone we had this conversation. I think the problem is young people have just been so coached to think this way, but also in terms of whether we're towards the end of this or we could get out of this, I think it's important to remember that in this age of cancel culture if you'd ask people, I think 2016 was a big flare-up point, ask people in 2018, is cancel culture over? They'd be like yeah, that's kind of a weird thing and Trump happened, then 2020 happened and I think that we've realized now that in this modern age any sort of social unrest that we have can really lead us down in a liberal drain, I think in 2024 I predict will be equally as bad. Yeah, we're pretty worried about 2024. Do you think the current flare-up over the Hamas atrocities in Israel is that and the back and forth about that, is that going to perpetuate this or is that the type of thing that actually pops the bubble? Well, here's the thing I would like to think that the sudden rediscovery of freedom of speech and for the first time really seriously talking about political neutrality something that we support at Fire is something that makes us kind of like oh good, this is finally happening but we're not naive. This is what always happens when the threat comes from outside of academia they circle the wagons and they say, oh academic freedom oh McCarthyism and they suddenly like they find the Bible again. But when the threat comes from on campus when it's students saying this professor is saying something that the pro-Palestinian students don't like and we want to get this person fired that's going to be the test and the test can't just be that one test they've got years to prove that they've actually rediscovered freedom of speech because if you look at the scale of sort of cancellations that have been allowed over the last 10 years you know you've got a lot to prove to the public so this, people are telling me this might be an inflection point I will believe it when I see it. Next question. So piggybacking off of the predecessor's question you mentioned about the Victorian area and everything like that choose your own adventure how do we promote a culture of humility which I know you mentioned in a recent interview with Noam Dorman or and or how do we promote intellectual diversity in our faculty at especially at elite institutions such that the solutions that you propose can thrive and Greg thank you for continuing the history and tradition of Alan Charles Cours immaculate facial hair and his fingers should be fired. It's all about the beards. Oh man, Ricky you and I are so let's tackle that question of ideological diversity on college campuses is that a extremely important it's extremely important because groups that don't have enough political diversity tend to get much more radicalized in the direction that's a group polarization that's really well established you know social science when it comes to that dynamic and we're not talking about institutions that have a majority of left-leaning we're talking about ones that have super majorities and very very small minority of conservatives some departments with no I mean what it's like 80-20 at a lot of schools where it's just most professors either define themselves is it usually you're using democrat and republican registration that's one of the ways you can do it and definitely the numbers are actually worse than 80-20 particularly in elite colleges and I'm just not seeing the genuine effort to actually try to address the viewpoint diversity problem and I'm not sure higher education can or necessarily should be saved if it's not willing to do this which is one of the reasons why I talk about if there was some crazy insane test on the humanities that only someone like Nick Gillespie could pass one out of a million people could pass I think that would be a much healthier way to figure out who the hardest working best read people are than sending them to Harvard today hmm next question it seems to me that maybe the cancel culture might be the latest manifestation of an innate instinct toward Lynch mob mentality do you think there's anything we can learn from past instances and are we doomed to repeat this forever over and over again? I think the one thing that we try to hammer home in the book is the fact that censorship is mankind's natural tendency we're all extremely fortunate to live in the relatively tiny sliver of history opposed to enlightenment where we realize that dissenting views are worth being heard and that free speech is a value that we should uphold and I think that we actually we call it censorship gravity in our book which is the idea that much like you might slouch you need to be mindful to set up straight and to roll back your shoulders and society needs to do the same thing because we've spent such a relatively tiny fraction of human history not burning our tics at the stake and unless we are very mindful and actually continuing this free speech culture and embracing those values I do agree with you that we will slip right back into that very fundamental base instinct and burning books is terrible for the environment right so let's do one more question and then we're going to talk a little biography and wrap up sir all right I I'm wondering if you have a hunch about an earlier year where some of this may have started I graduated in 2008 and I've always been kind of curious about the 2014 mark I know that's when a lot of the metrics in colleges and that kind of thing became noticeable but I know that even graduating 2008 I was aware that college seems there seem to be a move away from principles of free speech very much by that point so do you have a hunch as to I like Marcus was 1965 yeah there was some you know did something happen else I mean it was a slow build up basically the liberal the pro free speech liberals to a degree had to kind of die off and I think actually for a lot of my career that's one of the reasons why campuses weren't completely awful they were bad when I started in 2001 campuses were worse than I thought and I was kind of screaming my head off saying no the students are now good on freedom of speech the faculty is okay it's administrators that you got to worry about because they're actually the ones teaching people the liberal lessons and the ones who are bringing the charges and getting expelled etc in my first book on learning liberty I talk about 2007 as actually being the worst year that I saw and that was the education school driven you know that University of Delaware case it also involved a case of a student who got you know expelled for a collage they could claim was threatening was completely ridiculous case and how small that case that 2007 was compared to what I would see later is I we knew that something bad was coming so I wrote a short book called freedom from speech back in 2014 talking about how because I agree with Steve Pinker that essentially there's a lot of things that are getting better but I think there's a category of things that we call problems of progress that get worse because other things are getting better that essentially people you know who have more comfortable lives are going to be less comfortable with with disagreement with with the difficulty and ambiguity of actually arguing across lines of difference so I think that there are large societal factors that have led to this I think that there's a slow progression of lack of viewpoint diversity and the left that actually was anti free speech kind of taking over but as far as the thing that sped everything up it's social media social media took a number of existing trends and sped them up but it also created some new ones because you couldn't really like if you hated you know hated article Ricky wrote you'd send a new a letter to the New York Post and end up in the trash can now with everybody talking be able to talk at the same time you can take all your sock puppet accounts and all your friends and suddenly make it look like there's a horrible movement to get rid of this horrible racist reporter I have and I have to do something right now about it so cancel culture was something one of the reasons why we think it is a weird kind of thing that deserves to be understood as its own problem is it takes ancient instincts that are pro censorship adds a first time ever bizarre technology that allows billions of people to talk to each other at the same time and you know it created some real madness but also unbalanced or can you run the cost benefit analysis on that because isn't the world better off for social with social media oh man okay you're drawing me into 1521 okay so when I was at law school I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty and it was my own design because I'm a nerd and in 1521 and then again in 1538 Henry VIII tried to put the genie back in the bottle of the printing press because as far as those years are concerned this thing had been nothing but trouble it led to the witch trials increasing because that was one of the best sellers initially was the book about how to spot a witch it led to increased religious wars it was a terrible horrible invention that kind of ruined the world well as far as like from 1530 it was it was the original disruptive technology now what eventually happened with the printing press it allowed for massive disconfirmation which is which is getting closer to truth by chipping away at falsity because you had an extra couple million people few million people in the global discussion so ultimately the benefits of the printing press were huge in the short run it was kind of disastrous and I kind of and this is the thing I sometimes explain to height you know or to talk to him about is just the idea that we are in an unavoidably epistemically anarchal period we're in a crazy period and there's no way to just to get out of it and I think that the early days of social media in so many ways we're still trying to get our footing and figure out that the basics here both in terms of how do we engage in dialogue and online and not tarry each other down but not censor people who are criticizing vociferously but also on the on the front of young people and social media and technology I mean even despite the fact that that's a very near and dear issue to my heart having grown up with social media having a ton of friends with with scars on their wrists as a result of being on tumblr for their entire tween years like we're still we're still trying to find the groundwork in the footing and despite that context and the fact that I I saw secondhand some of the worst steps of what social media can do I am still a techno optimist I do think that we'll figure out as a culture when is it appropriate for kids to go online what are the the confines of speech that that is appropriate in a social media world but we're in that crazy space where we just don't have any idea what the ground rules are and I really do hold out the possibility that those extra billion eyes on individual problems can if we harnessed it better and didn't waste our time on cat videos and cancel culture could actually be something that could help us figure out I like cat videos I do love cat videos they're very soothing and they are the they are the way forward I mean I think we all agree you know it is interesting to think about it being in the early stages of social media because we and especially if you think about it the broader term participatory culture which really started cranking up in the 90s people are like oh no this is never going to change we're never going to learn anything but you know Greg you were citing the problems that Henry VIII had with the printing press a century later there was another mass profusion under King Charles you know starting under King James in England and you know there was a period where tens of thousands of pamphlets were being published on an annual basis and it's kind of glorious when you look back because it gave voice to a lot of people but it's ugly absolutely let's close out by talking a little bit about these steps of how do we get to that place where we're doing better one of your in the part three of the book you talked about what to do about it one is raising kids who are not counselors I always get scared whenever I hear that the children are our future having been one and having given you know having fathered two but how do we raise kids who are not counselors well I think that the most important thing that gives parents a leg up right now is realizing that most young people actually know whether or not they understand free speech basics they understand that they don't want to live unless canceled culture society so there are a couple things that parents can do one is lead by example and actually be mindful of the fact that for example for me I was never offered a debate club at school I was taught pretty implicitly that that words can wound and that differing viewpoints can be dangerous and parents need to take care to counteract that and not just take for granted that their kids schools are inculcating those values you should be playing devil's advocate at the kitchen table but also teach people I think this is the most important thing that kids need to realize is that there's strength in numbers and that if their friend gets torn down if they're a good person it doesn't matter if they agree with the speech that they're getting attacked for but they need to stand up for their friends because every single person today that is getting a new job getting their first job I had an iPhone when I was 10 we all have stupid bad stuff in our past because we've been overly online and our digital footprint is massive but we need to all realize that we need what will we do that young people need to be willing to stand up for their friends and to say they're a good person and you're attacking them and maligning them in an unfair way Greg one of the other chats that you talk about is keeping your corporation out of the culture war so any CEOs in the audience please perk up what does that mean to keep your corporation out of the culture war well part one is try to make sure you're not handling counselors hiring counselors in the first place make sure that you actually have something in the screening saying again can you work with people you disagree with and you know I think most employees will say sure and it's like really like and then ask them kind of like what if a fellow employee is interesting like if somebody says no I can't you know okay you should name particular issues you know like saying kind of like what what if I think I'm totally on Israel side on this or what if I think biological sex is real you actually we do this at fire we actually give them like real examples of it we're not hiring you so I think that the screening process a big part of it I actually think that you know that a lot of corporations are going to find out just like universities the tremendous benefit of political neutrality of not taking a freaking position on everything going on you talk about coinbase the crypto exchange explain what they did their CEO Brian Armstrong at one point in time just drew a line in the sand and said we as an institution are viewpoint neutral you're perfectly welcome to have your own politics in your own time but we're not going to make any stances as a corporation and they said you can either take it or leave it and around five percent of their employees left it and actually packed up as a result and those are the five percent of people that you just don't want working for you so more power to I mean that is kind of an elegant solution they got to pay out to go away and they're better off and then the it's a win win win win what about in a universities to bring it back to you know the current situation in Israel universities love to shoot their mouths off about all kinds of things should universities you know Greg in your perfect universe would universities never talk about anything other than higher education or should they be you know is the problem that they're making too any statements or that they are not making the right statements or that they're just hypocritical in my perfect universe every university would adopt a 1967 university of Chicago Calvin report which is a very strong admonition not to take political positions like we are not the speaker we are the form for the speakers and the thinkers which I think is the right attitude to have about higher education however the fact that they decided to do this now when they've talked about every other issue ever is something I'm also something in the O.C. register talking about like how cynical you should be cynical you should be skeptical they're discovering this you know partially for cynical reasons because they're too and by the way this comes from this comes from cancel culture because like what happened at Harvard the way you're able to have students who think everyone's going to think my position that Israel is entirely responsible for these horrific attacks is you know it's pretty commonly held opinion and that people are probably going to disagree with me and that's normal is partially because people were too afraid to actually say no that's nuts so cancel culture partially created that but the other way that it created it was I know that a lot of these university presidents support Israel I know that they actually thought the Hamas attacks were absolutely horrifying and they were too afraid to say so because they thought their careers might be over. What are they afraid of because there's no question that you know Americans broadly speaking you know I mean a massive majority as well as people in universities would be of course these are horrific barbaric attacks. They're afraid of three things their faculty their administrators and their students not all of them but the most activist ones are the ones they're afraid of that finally and I'm not exhausting the entire part three what to do about it but you talk about the adulthood of the American mind explain what you mean by that Ricky. Yeah so this is the the conclusion of our book where we really make the case that we all need to buy into this free speech culture that the only way we can supplant cancel culture is by going back to the old idioms that so many Americans were raised up with like to each their own this is a free country everyone's entitled to their own opinion because they think we've underestimated just how far we drifted away from that parents have not realized that they need to be aggressively mindful in instilling those values into a generation of young people who've been taught the absolute opposite whether it was in K-12 or in college campuses that words can wound and always trust your feelings and that you can insulate yourself you need safe spaces and trigger warnings we all need to buy in to fight back against this tyranny of the minority of people who want to tear other people down to exercise cheap ad hominem attacks and dodge actual meaningful conversation because that's the only way if we actually want to move forward in a diverse and pluralistic society we need to be able to have civil conversation and dialogue about the touchiest and most contentious issues and unless we actually mindfully fight back against cancel culture we are just going to slump down into dangerous and illiberal tendencies all right thank you we're going to leave it there we have this is Ben the reason speak easy which is a live taping of the reason interview podcast we've been talking with Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlatt authors of the canceling of the American mind cancel culture and the minds trust destroys institutions and threatens us all but there is a solution please give them a big big round of applause